Your Taxes Are Being Spent on Making It Harder for Americans to Vote

MADISON, WISCONSIN—One of the most charming features of the failed state of Brownbackistan, once known as Kansas, is that it is also the de facto ground zero for the ongoing campaign to squeeze out of the political process those people unlikely to vote for Republican candidates. This is largely due to its Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, who not only is one of the primary innovators in the field of voter suppression, but also is one of the primary parental units for anti-immigrant legislation, having been the author of Arizona's notorious "Papers, Please" law. These two things, of course, work in obvious harmony to squeeze out of the political process those people who are unlikely to vote for Republican candidates. Nice work, Kris. In the 1950s, people went to prison for rigging college basketball games less egregiously than you're trying to rig democracy.

Lately, we've seen more evidence of how thoroughgoing this depravity truly is. Central to it is something called the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an institution created with good intentions in the aftermath of the Great Florida Heist in 2000. One of the things the commission is tasked with is overseeing the national voter registration form. It is supposed to be staffed by two members from each party. Now, however, to the surprise of approximately nobody, there are two Republicans and one Democrat because a vacancy has gone unfilled. One of the Republicans is a guy named Brian Newby, and here's where voters in Alabama and Georgia discover that, as far as their right to vote is concerned, they're also living in Brownbackistan.

Newby, the commission's executive director, got his start overseeing elections in Johnson County in Kansas. He is one of Kobach's proteges—if, by protégé, you mean faithful minion and dutiful mole.

An email provided to The Associated Press through open records requests offers a glimpse into the mindset of Brian Newby, executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, who decided—without public comment or approval from bosses—that residents of Alabama, Kansas and Georgia can no longer register to vote using a national form without providing proof of U.S. citizenship. As a finalist for the job of executive director, Newby said in a June email to his benefactor, Kansas' Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, that he was friends with two of the commissioners at the federal agency, and told Kobach: "I think I would enter the job empowered to lead the way I want to." Voting rights advocates were stunned by Newby's action once he got the job and have sued to overturn it. Activists say it flies in the face of the commission's mission to provide a simple, easy form to encourage voter registration.

You will undoubtedly fall over in shock to discover that the commission's mission is not Newby's. Or Kobach's.

Documents obtained by AP show Newby's ties to Kobach, the architect of voter ID and other restrictive voter registration laws around the nation that he says are needed to prevent voter fraud. Critics say there is very little voter fraud and Kobach's measures hurt voter registration and deprive eligible voters of the right to vote. Kobach had appointed Newby to be a county elections commissioner in Kansas, and helped him get the federal job that he took in November. "I wanted you in the loop, in part because of other issues in the past with the EAC," Newby emailed Kobach. "I also don't want you thinking that you can't count on me in an upcoming period that will tax our resources."

In case you're wondering, you are not part of "our" resources, except in the sense that you're paying the salaries of the people who will use "our" resources to disenfranchise people.

Kobach said Wednesday that he spoke to one, and possibly two of the Republican commissioners, about Newby prior to his hiring. "I told that person I thought Newby would be excellent and he was one of Kansas' most talented county election officers and indeed one of the most talented election officers in country," Kobach said. But documents from open records requests and interviews by AP show that as early as April 2015 and continuing in the months leading to Newby's hiring by the commission, Kobach and his staff met with county officials to discuss concerns about Newby's job performance in Kansas. Those concerns led officials to call for an audit of the Johnson County election office Newby led. Kobach told AP he never informed the federal commissioners about those problems, and insisted they would not have affected Newby's performance at his federal job. The audit released earlier this month found Newby intentionally skirted oversight of government credit card expenses, wasted taxpayer funds and improperly claimed mileage and travel expenses while at his former job in Kansas. Newby has called the audit inaccurate and misleading.

Oh. OK.

Here at the shebeen, we often quote Stalin's order to the Red Army when the Germans invaded—"ni shagu nazad," not one step backwards—to illustrate how movement conservatives are unrelenting in the pursuit of their political goals, and to illustrate that it is now accepted wisdom that there really is no such thing as the commons, and that it is now accepted wisdom that no progressive achievement ever should be thought of as permanent. Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of voting rights. Not even the Voting Rights Act, dearly bought with actual blood, was immune to this phenomenon; long before he declared the Day Of Jubilee in the Shelby County case, Chief Justice John Roberts had the VRA in his sights and his predecessor, William Rehnquist, made his bones in Republican politics harassing minority voters in Arizona.

The good folks at the Brennan Center bring us another example of how the campaign to limit the franchise doesn't miss many tricks. This one, which takes place about a half-hour's drive from this very keyboard, would be comical, if it weren't part of something so serious.

For example, the office in Sauk City, Wisconsin is open only on the fifth Wednesday of any month. But only four months in 2012—February, May, August, and October—have five Wednesdays.

If this reminds you of the new laws initiated by the rebel government in San Marcos, especially the one about the underwear, you're not alone. That's the entire point. First, you make democracy an obvious sham, and then you join the rest of the suckers in laughing at it. Not one step backwards.

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